Google Spam Policies: The Decisions That Matter
The practices Google publishes as grounds for ranking a page or a whole site lower, or removing it from results, from cloaking and hidden text to the abuse policies added in 2024.
Samir Haddad
The key figures
- Scaled content abuse
- many pages made primarily to manipulate rankings, whether written by people, automation or both
- Site reputation abuse
- third-party pages published on a host site to exploit the host's ranking signals
- Expired domain abuse
- buying an expired domain to host low-value content that trades on its past reputation
- Enforcement
- algorithmic demotion, or a manual action reported in Search Console
- Date the three abuse policies were added
- March 2024
Why this is worth getting right
Since March 2024 the policies name scaled content abuse, site reputation abuse and expired domain abuse, which describe tactics many sites had been using at volume without thinking of them as spam.
Do this, not that
Do
- Publish a page only when it says something its neighbors do not
- Measure overlap across any generated page set before it goes live
- Check the Manual actions report in Search Console as part of routine monitoring
- Keep third-party content on your domain under your own editorial control
- Remove or noindex pages that exist only to capture search variations
Don’t
- Swapping a city or industry name across otherwise identical pages
- Hosting partner coupon or review sections unrelated to your business
- Buying expired domains for their backlinks
- Assuming the problem is AI-written text rather than pages with nothing to offer
When to bring in help
Our advice Bring in help when a manual action appears in Search Console, when traffic falls sharply after a spam update, or before launching a large set of templated pages.
Where this comes from
- Google Search Central — Spam policies for Google web search
- Google Search Central — March 2024 core update and new spam policies
The figures and practices above come from the sources listed.
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